The delivery of restaurant services of all manner and variety is a burgeoning field. Changing life styles have resulted in a tremendous growth in the food service industry. Proportionately, the trend is moving toward a decrease in the number of meals prepared at home relative to those consumed at commercial food service establishments; this is true of all of the traditional meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) as well as "snacks." Equally important is an appreciation that meals from commercial establishments must be of good quality with a decided preference for freshly prepared, hot meals by many consumers; meals served under sanitary conditions. This is true whether one looks to conventional meals or snacks.
The combination of factors outlined above has tended to impact on most restaurant businesses, including the now ubiquitous fast-food restaurants. The classic mode of delivering meals or other food preparations centers around a kitchen area in which one or more individuals attend to food preparation under controlled sanitation conditions and a food delivery area in which customers are served those preparations. Most often, there is also an area in which the customer will consume the purchased food preparations and that may constitute yet another distinct zone of operation within a restaurant for purposes of analyzing the delivery of food services.
Quality of food service demanded by today's consumer is a multifaceted issue. Apart from personal taste and the aesthetic presentation of a meal, health interests dominate this business. Perhaps nowhere else in local government is the concern for delivery of a safe product greater than in delivering food; food preparation areas are subject to strict health codes and regulations, cleanliness of those areas is a subject of continual governmental inspection, the quality of food items comprising the meal to be delivered is subject to close scrutiny, the manner in which food products are handled is carefully regulated, the personal health habits of individuals contacting food preparations at any stage of the process is a matter of grave concern, to name but a few of the issues which must be addressed in this business. Related to the full panoply of appropriate anxiety respecting the preparation and delivery of food to consumers, it is further pertinent to observe that much of the organizational hierachy in a typical restaurant is dictated by a specific concern over health hazards-one who touches unwrapped food must wash or protect his hands every time he contacts currency. That is one of the principal reasons why those individuals who prepare food are precluded from direct interaction with customers. Rather, waiters or other servers provide a buffer between the food preparation zone and the payment or delivery zone of a traditional restaurant, whether or not it is operating as a fast food restaurant.
For these and other reasons, one can readily appreciate the great inefficiencies that would be associated with the operation of typical fast food restaurants or convenience stores where the tasks of food preparation and money handling are combined. It is generally considered unworkable because more time ultimately will be spent cleansing the server's hands of potential contamination (or removing gloves worn to protect the server's hands from contamination), a sanitary and health-code imposed task, than either delivering food or collecting money, a business imposed task if that business is to be operated productively. On the other hand, it is generally regarded as unworkable to rely on self-regulation; both design and policing or the threat of policing compliance with health regulations are required or compliance will typically not be achieved. As will be seen from the ensuing discussion, the present invention obviates these historical problems without sacrificing either safe health practices, operator efficiency or profitability; to the contrary, improving all. This is achieved, in part, by a system in which the delivery of a comestible product occurs in a preferably cashless transaction. For purposes of broader understanding of the implications of that mode of operation, a brief review of certain prior art may be helpful.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,128,757 concerns the delivery of food items, expedited by a particular customer-initiated ordering system. The approach suggested in the '757 patent entails the use of a punchcard which is comprised of a generally opaque web bearing indicia which identify menu items and an array of punchout blanks which may be removed by a customer desiring to order a correlated item. The blanks are arranged in a specific configuration so that the card may be scanned photo-optically. Thus, a customer's selection of certain menu items can be registered electronically to achieve the objective of a customer-initiated ordering system.
In one aspect of the system disclosed in the '757 patent, computer means are electrically coupled to the photosensitive detectors which scan and decode the information encrypted onto the web by the customer's selective removal of punchouts. In this way, information relating to the order may be displayed at any of a number of remote or other desirable locations to facilitate the assembly and delivery of the desired food items. An employee of the restaurant fills the order and delivers the requested food items to a distribution area where the customer may be served. The use of a computer also tends to provide a means by which inventory control may be maintained and product statistics collected should the restaurant operator be so inclined. Although this system undoubtedly operates efficiently for its intended purpose, it does not address the underlying problem noted above; some type of buffering activity is necessary to separate those who prepare the food from a customer passing money in payment for that food since those in the food preparation area may not handle or otherwise contact currency or similar sources of potential biological contamination. See also the food delivery system described in German Patent DE-B-2 319 040.
A vending format for the delivery of wrapped food items is the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 4,361,754. The implementation suggested there is the replacement of a typical coin-operated vending mechanism with what those patentees dub a "record-operated" control system. In that instance, a card (or record) is encoded with information representing the value of money, typically via the use of a magnetic strip which is encoded by an appropriate writing mechanism. The encoded card is disposed within a reader associated with a vending machine. The reader decodes magnetic indicia resident on the card to ascertain whether sufficient value is present to enable a vending operation. If there is, the customer may obtain an item from the vending machine in the ordinary manner and the "record" will be updated to reflect the purchase. The '754 patent is highly specific to the circuitry involved in implementing the aforementioned concept and, thus, bears little relationship to the present invention beyond those conceptual terms.
Another system concerning the delivery of food services and the use of an encoded token is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,754,119. That patent relates to an apparatus for tabulating information contained on a ticket which includes a magnetically encoded strip. The disclosed invention particularly concerns a ticket which might be utilized by a school child participating in a subsidized food program, in which case the ticket is specially encoded to contain information regarding that child's individual entitlement. The card described in the specification of the '119 patent contains a plurality of magnetically encoded strips, one of which is severed from the card or ticket by the apparatus employed to read the data represented on the strips. In that instance, the apparatus is only capable of reading information, not writing or otherwise encoding information on the card.
Background patents which concern electronically or magnetically encoded cards or tokens which represent money or money's worth include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,614,861, 4,458,142, and 3,984,660. Those patents relate to devices for encoding information on such a card and controlling its disposition when the card is put to use involving, for example, so-called "smart cards." Still other background references include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,562,490 and 4,599,510 which relate to apparatus used to read and/or write information onto such cards or tokens, and to update the information represented thereon.
The prior art discussed above reflects a failure to appreciate fundamental sources of inefficiency in the delivery of food services. The art has, to date, failed to provide a unified food preparation and delivery system in which a food service operator who is required to contact unwrapped comestibles is freed from the need to contact money or other items presented by a customer which are or have the potential to be sources of biological contamination. Thus, the art has failed to materialize a system which permits the efficient delivery of food services by a single operator, requiring instead that several zones of operation be maintained to buffer food preparation from cash collection. Economics have denied sanitary, manually-delivered food service to a large segment of the consuming public.